Agronomy is a science and art of plant cultivation to fulfil human needs in the form of foods, industrial raw materials, fuels, and ornamentals. It is, by nature, an applied science and deals with technologies used by humans to manage land or media to grow plants, manipulate plant growth, and to treat the harvest. Although gradually diminished as main contributors, plant production still plays a major role in Indonesia’s economy. Also, the seeds industry in Indonesia is becoming important as the need for quality seeds is seeing higher demands. These changes need a new wave of highly expertised manpowers to fulfil and the Agronomy Study Program realises these situations.
The Bachelor program in Agronomy (as a section within the Department of Crop Production) has a long history: it has stood since the faculty was founded. Its importance was and is of no question: Indonesia economy has been an agriculture based country and it needed badly technology and manpower to develop the war-ridden country during the faculty establishment in 1946, while at the time only a single agriculture high school were available in Indonesia (in Bogor), School of agronomy in the Faculty of Agriculture (under the name of “Plant Cultivation Section”) provided new manpower that mostly filled vacant teacher and plantation manager positions left by Dutch or other foreign expatriates. This motivation has gradually changed as Indonesia’s economy stabilised and the need for researchers and well-educated farmers has been growing to fill the needs of professional expertise.
As Faculty of Agriculture is granted with a piece of land used as a tea plantation (since the end of 1950’s) and has a long tradition of studying crop cultivation in suboptimal areas, such as lands with less water availability and higher salinity as well as subforest yards, the study program has put the emphasis on cases in such areas, i.e. plantation estates in the curriculum. This focusing is aimed to answer challenges in the future, that are shifting of land use to less arable lands, competitive land usage, and application of automatisation and virtual connectivity.
The bachelor level study program under the name of Agronomy Study Program officially established in 1983, based on the decree no. dated 29 September 1983. The name “Agronomy” (“Agronomi” in Indonesian) is listed on the Appendix I of the Decree of General Director of Education and Student Affair no. dated 22 February 2019 on List of Study Program Name in Higher Education Institution. In the recent state, the Agronomy Study Program is a merge from two study programs established in 1994. The study programs were “Agronomy” and “Plant Breeding” and both were managed by the Department of Plant Cultivation. They were officially established by the decree of the University rector no. dated 26 August 1996. Since 2015, both study programs were merged and are continuing as specialisation under the Agronomy Study Program. The specialisation is offered to students after the second year of study, and acceptance is based on the student’s own choice and their respective notes.
Graduates of the study program are granted with “Sarjana Pertanian” (S.P.) degree (translates into Bachelor in Agriculture). The alumni of the study program may become members of the Agriculture Chapter of the alumni organisation of the University (Kagama Pertanian), Indonesian Agronomy Association (Peragi), and Indonesian Breeding Science Association (Peripi), to name a few.
Here are Agronomy’s Graduate Profile :
- Practitioners/ professionals/ field assistant who can cultivation of plant, utilizing informati on and technology of plant production based on Good Agriculture Practices (GAP) approach to produce solutions in Agriculture.
- Research assistants who are able to conduct scientific research and development of knowledge and disseminate it through various media types.
- Entrepreneur who create and develop their own businesses/ companies in Agriculture